Institutions of Higher Abstraction

Campbell’s Coup

This post is inspired by Darryl Campbell’s new book: Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software

Say, what time does the anarchist convention start?

I feel lucky to have caught the tail end of learning in education. I had a literature professor in college who was an avowed anarchist. His syllabus was half a page long. (These days, they are anything from five to fifty pages.) We read Gorky and Chekov. Then we came to class, sat in a circle, and stared at each other until somebody said something. It was more like a Quaker meeting than a class. He had no plan, no desired outcome, no structure beyond sitting in a circle. The pressure was on us, especially those of us who can’t stand conversational silence, to say something worth saying. He would respond. Then fall silent again and wait.

This approach, needless to say, would not be tolerated now.

The beginning of outcomes; the end of learning

One thing that doesn’t happen in colleges and universities these days is learning. In fact, learning is prohibited or, at any rate, not officially sanctioned. To be legible to machines, classes are now viewed as a series of outcomes. Students are providers of measurable output. Teachers facilitate the gathering of output. Administrators, an ever-metastasizing managerial class, feed the output into the data stream, and are rewarded via a somewhat arbitrary number which measures effectiveness.

For example, imagine you are a young person entering college in 2025 (good luck, friend) and you are interested in Shakespeare. OK, sign up for the class. Don’t worry, there’s room! On the first day, you will be confronted with a syllabus that may say something like:

Students will demonstrate an understanding of iambic pentameter as measured by production of fourteen lines in regular meter with at least 80% accuracy.

Pity the poor Shakespeare scholar who had to write this and at least five other measurable outcomes. Then she had to submit the measurements to the chair. The chair reported to the associate dean who reported to the dean who reported to the VP (or provost or whatever) who compiled the data with the assessment team (comprised of several deans, chairs, and associates) who sent the data to the accrediting body, who judged the data against the previous measure from five years ago.

In the thirty years since I left undergrad, college administration has grown (depending on the data, you can do your own search) anywhere from 85% to 415%. At the same time, full-time faculty positions have vanished, particularly in the humanities. From the point of view of data-collecting software, administrative bloat is necessary to feed the right stats into the system which, in turn, keeps the funding going. Software, accountability structures, new technology, all were supposed to make colleges more streamlined, fair, and effective. But trying to put education in the same category as widget manufacturing has created a massive square-peg-round-hole problem that an army of assistants to the associate dean can’t fix.

(The attractive and wonderful administrators at my place of employment are an exception to the rule.)

OK, but what are you going to do with that degree?

It's hard to overstate the hostility to learning and the humanities that occurred sometime around the dot-com bubble and when Bush Jr laid down a massive country-wide testing and measuring regime on every student (but especially poor students). That was around the time I entered academia. I learned to turn my poetry class into measurable student learning outcomes. I helped write reports to the accrediting bodies that proved students were doing something in poetry class besides learning.

Learning is suspect because learning is subjective, like love, music, art, and beauty. Subjectivity itself, the whirling interior universe of every human mind, is suspicious. The managerial class does not tolerate immeasurability. The antipathy toward learning and the humanities, as opposed to measuring and STEM, is nothing new. CP Snow wrote about it in 1959 in The Two Cultures:

Professors: the fussy, elbow-patched misogynists of yore

There was a point to the anger directed at the power of college professors who had the ability to grade you based, seemingly, on a whim. What grade was I supposed to get in my anarchist Marxist literature class? Grades are important data that affects our lives, earning power, and job opportunities. How could you explain your gentleman’s C in Literary Theory to your parents or employer? What if your professor was racist, sexist, or any other “ist” that might affect you negatively?

Fair enough. Yet somehow American education has accrued a carapace of bullshit that surrounds “learning” such that anything important or interesting or inspiring that happens in class is discarded in favor of a measurement. And these measurements are only nominally less racist, sexist, etc. than a random literature professor.

Hamlet has failed to make decisions with 20% improved efficiency

Having gutted our universities of previously thriving humanities departments, the focus has now turned on destroying previously thriving STEM fields. I have perhaps a slight hint of schadenfreude when I see the antipathy formerly reserved for poets and dancers now turned upon STEM fields. How will the war between the disciplines be “won”? In an ideal world, at least if you are a computer, students and faculty would both be, if not A.I., at least computerized; transformed into abstract data, easily measured, readable.  

Learning is an ephemeral, subjective, even beautiful thing that happens, I think, in fits and starts and not upon a measurable trajectory. Learning comes from everywhere – from experience in the world with other humans, with nature, with society. But it only happens if we are open to it. Signing up to be a data point for a university administration may not inspire learning.

Students must, at their peril, make their own desire path toward knowledge. Their learning will always be inchoate and will begin with a nagging question. Maybe: What does it mean to be human within this system? The student’s job is simply to be quiet long enough to hear the question that will animate them. The teacher is there as a guide for the students to find their answers. When this relationship works it’s not love, exactly, but it’s something beautiful. Or, as Hamlet might have told his faculty chair, if his faculty chair was Horatio:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your five-year report to the accreditors.

Desire Paths tiptoes through your tulips every two weeks. It’s always something that goes like: What is “X” like in an age of technology? That’s the bit. Interested? Want to foist it upon your friends? Send it to them, tell them to subscribe, then go touch grass (but wash hands after).